About Data

Information About the Commission's Data

The Commission collects a wide variety of data about higher education in California.
New data and sources of data are always being added.
The database driving the website has over 100 million records and is constantly growing.
Use these pages as a Guide to information about the data we maintain.

Information Collection Program

A frequently asked question is "how do we get our data"?
We obtain unitary (individual records) enrollment and completions data from the public higher education
systems (UC, CSU, Community Colleges). These data are then aggregated to create useful data for you, our
consumers.

We receive aggregated data (pre-combined counts from a variety of columns such as school code, gender and ethnicity)
from the California Department of Education (CDE), the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), and other sources.
CDE provides data on K-12 students and high school graduates. IPEDS supplies enrollment and completions data for
private higher education institutions.